Culture Bin

Music has the great gift of conjuring up memories and reminding us of times long past. Well, over the weekend, two big acts from the ‘90s who have somewhat dropped off the musical map traveled to Charlottesville (via time machine, perhaps?) to remind us of who they were, and why they mattered. Taking the stage first was Toad the Wet Sprocket, who broke through on the alternative rock music scene in 1991 with their reverb-drenched single “All I Want.” Led by front man Glen Phillips, the band played all the songs that made them famous, including “Walk on the Ocean,” as well some newer, equally melodic tunes that, at times, recaptured the band’s famous way with a catchy, harmony-laden hook. Although the Toadsters officially parted ways in 1998, they’ve reunited for this summer tour and, if this performance is any indication, they might just have a chance of capturing a new audience. Second out of the gate was Big Head Todd and the Monsters, those frat-circuit faves who rose out of Colorado in the ‘90s with their hit album Sister Sweetly. Big Head Todd’s signature R&B sound, coupled with American rock anthems, propelled them to the top of the charts. The Charlottesville crowd definitely hung onto their favorites, including “Bittersweet,” ”It’s Alright,” “Boom Boom” and “Circle.” There was certainly no shortage of energy, and guitarist Todd Park Mohr played his guitar with infectious flair and flavor.

It was a surprisingly memorable evening at the Pavilion, and many listeners seemed delighted to be reminded of those brighter, less complicated days in the mid-‘90s when Big Head Todd and TtWS filled the musical gap between Seattle’s grunge explosion and traditional American pop. There was definitely some nostalgia in their acts, but, like all of us, these acts just keep looking and pushing forward.— Bjorn Turnquist

Enchanted April

Heritage Repertory Theatre

Through July 15

stage

Along with my ticket to Heritage Rep’s production of the stage version of Enchanted April, I brought some baggage. I’m a fan of the original 1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim—a oncefamous and now sadly neglected writer, and a fascinating woman whose life was as spirited as the title of her autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life. And I’m also a fan of the 1992 movie version, starring Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright, Alfred Molina, Michael Kitchen and Jim Broadbent—a virtual who’s who of inimitable British actors.

To all this could I add yet another layer of appreciation? Would I encounter a whole new way to engage with the story of four women—two disenchanted housewives, Lotty Wilton and Rose Arnott (Beth Gervain and Ann Talman), a young socialite, Caroline Bramble (Faith Noelle Hurley), and an elderly dowager, Mrs. Graves (Daria T. Okugawa)—in post- World War I England who muck in together to rent a villa on the Italian Riviera? The answer: Act I left me cold, and not just because it takes place in a drizzly London, while Act II warmed me back up, and not just because the lovely villa and the rest of the set designed by Tom Bloom seems drenched in sunshine.

Veteran Heritage Rep director Douglas Sprigg lacks ideas when it comes to creating tension in Act I. Yes, Lotty and Rose’s husbands, Mellersh and Frederick (John Paul Scheidler and Robert Porter), are just the right shade of irritating, but the wives’ longing to replace a sterile world with a fertile one is more stated than deeply communicated. In fact, the only real tension is between Talman and Okugawa’s subtleand Gervain and Hurley’s overly mannered performances.

Act II clears the playing field. Sprigg suddenly seems right at home. With little brushstrokes he builds a rich atmosphere that pools the resources of all the actors. And with splashes of color he stretches out the elements of classic British farce— stronger than in the novel and the movie— to garner some genuine laughs.

In the end, the charming story charmed me once again.—Doug Nordfors

NFL Head Coach

Electronic Arts

PlayStation 2, Xbox, PC Rated: Everyone

Games

I now know why Bill Belicheck seems terminally grim (even when his team is winning) and Marty Schottenheimer and Tony Dungy always look like they’ve swallowed several wads of tinfoil on the sideline.

Being an NFL head coach is the world’s most tedious job, you see, and they’re dreading the 100-plus hours of micromanagement tasks they’ll be slogging through when the final gun sounds.

That’s the impression you get, anyway, from playing through a season in NFL Head Coach, Electronic Arts’ debut attempt at a sports-management sim. This is a game that, for better and for worse, puts the minutiae of literally thousands of coaching and management decisions squarely into your twitching hands. Down time? The high life? Not in this league, baby—there are plays to develop and e-mails to read.

Historically, these sorts of games have been little more than menu-based spreadsheet programs masquerading as sports games. In terms of text-based management sims, football’s fallen on especially hard times here in the States; Front Office Football, that old series veteran, has been MIA since 2003. NFL Head Coach takes what was great about those games, adds enough extra busywork to choke even Vince Lombardi and puts a nifty graphicalsheen on the whole affair. Setting practice times, massaging depth charts, hiring coaches and free agents—these are just a handful of things you’ll have to do before even calling the first snap.

The Madden engine fuels the actual onfield parts of the game, so the plays you eventually develop and call will look as sharp as they do when you’re the one controlling them in Madden ‘06. Unfortunately, you’re not the one controlling them here— you just pick and hope for the best, a goal the game’s AI botches a little too often. Even when you’ve slathered the positive motivation and maxed out attribute points, a well-prepped quarterback will still cough up some seriously puzzling turnovers. Then again, I imagine this is how Brian Billick feels when he’s watching Kyle Boller heft his third interception of the day, so perhaps EA’s nailed this aspect more closely than I realize.

If you’re the sort who’d rather be the one juking the D for a 70-yard touchdown run in Madden ‘06, run far, far away from Head Coach—you’ll likely be clawing your eyes out before preseason begins. Control freaks, on the other hand, may just have found the foundation for a Super Bowl contender. —Aaron Conklin

Culture Bin

In the beginning, everybody is tense, or at least having problems with tense, as evidenced by the sign on the backstage door that says, “Employees only passed this point.”

By the end of the night, however, that had all been washed away by the sharp drop-kick-of-adrenaline snare drum that starts the toy-piano frenzy of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”—but that was much, much later, and first came the doorman and a serious case of over guest-listing, but that’s to be expected, because all of Old Weird Charlottesville must be here. And I do mean old—groupies were maxing out in at least the mid-60s. It felt as if someone should be calling BINGO, what with the buffet and round tables, each with signs for the big
Albemarle
County reunion: Batesville class of ‘72, Free Union class of ‘67, Belmont ‘88, and Crozet ‘93. I’m talking serious old man/barely pubescent girl overload, but it’s all in good fun, and once the music starts, the only band in the world inspired by spot-welding plays something. How to describe it? Tom Waits in a group grope with The Pogues? Leonard Cohen gone spastic with the delirium tremens blues again? Whatever it is, you and all these half-drunk old Southern lawyers sure can dance to it, and longtime locals can do the Fridays After 5 shuffle to it, and lordy, lordy how the little girls in American Dumpster panties can shake their Humbert Humberts to it. So much good-natured stomping in one place! The art of falling down onstage, and the inevitable Johnny Cash cover, which, inevitably, works.

(I have a secret fear at every concert that someone on stage is going to trip over a cord and get hurt, and I spend the whole night hoping against hope that it doesn’t happen. Maybe it’s my fear that keeps it from happening. Maybe it’s my fear that keeps us all alive and dancing.)

It is both very easy and very hard to be a local hero. It is strange to have your local hero tell you that “You’re the shit” onstage in front of your friends and family. It is hard, and strange, but not as hard or strange on a night like this. Nights like this are big group hugs for the band and for us because everybody knows everybody, everybody is somebody, and it’s all alright because, for a rock band—any rock band—this moment right now, when they are at the height of their local fame (and as such are still recognizable to themselves, and to us) is as good as it gets, and will never come again, and someday we will all turn to each other and ask “Were you there?”

The weird thing is, I was there at
Martha
Jefferson
Hospital circa 1975, when bandleader Christian Breeden was born, and the first thing he says to me tonight is, “Hey man, you had that cool girlfriend in high school. Whatever happened to her?” I was with him in the bathroom between sets as he stared into the mirror, asking about my old girlfriend, but I bear no grudge, because his band is good enough—nay, great enough, or at least exactly enough of what we all need right now—for me to forgive him.

American Dumpster is the band that
Charlottesville must shore against its ruin.—J. Tobias Beard

PQ: Whatever it is, you and half-drunk old Southern lawyers sure can dance to it, and longtime locals can do the Fridays After 5 shuffle to it, and lordy, lordy how the little girls in American Dumpster panties can shake their Humbert Humberts to it. So much good-natured stomping in one place!

Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

Four
County
Players

Through May 28

stage

Fresh off the heels of directing the all-female The World’s Wife for Live Arts, Francine Smith’s follow-up project is Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean—which has parts for nine women, and one man. Wow. What’s next for Smith, the testosterone-laden Glengarry Glen Ross?

Gender shmender. All that matters is that Jimmy Dean exhibits the same mix of good casting and professionalism that made The World’s Wife so satisfying.

Ed Graczyk’s play takes place on September 30, 1975, at a five-and-dime store in the town of McCarthy,
Texas (where Giant, the last film starring James Dean, was shot). A cadre of women, former members of the “Disciples of James Dean,” gathers to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Dean’s fatal auto accident. Through flashbacks neatly woven into the action, it becomes clear how the actual presence of an untouchable heartthrob in their town was almost too much for the poor girls’ brains to handle, and why the fact that God is dead, so to speak, continues to haunt them.

It’s difficult at first to know what to make of the grown women. Have they matured at all? Are their exhumed pasts, and seemingly trivial obsession, worth caring about? Smith wisely doesn’t force the characters on us, which is good, since the play eventually contains almost too many sensationalistic details and stabs at profundity for the audience’s poor brains to handle. By the time we learn that Mona (played with just the right degree of solemnity by Liz Porter) may have actually, um, touched the untouchable Dean, and notice that Joanne (played with consistent subtlety by Jen Downey) bears some resemblance to Mona’s teenage friend Joe (Greg Miller), the production is firmly grounded in reality, and Graczyk’s fanciful and aggressive plotting goes down as easy as an Orange Crush on a hot Texas day.—Doug Nordfors

Blake Hurt

“Not Just a Pretty Face”

McGuffey
Art
Center

art

Blake Hurt’s colorful, kinetic “ink collages” are portraits of friends, but they’re also a portrait of a brilliant mind—his own. This is a man who acknowledges it takes years to write a computer program to portray a single individual. And “pretty” is not the first word that comes to mind. Try meticulous. Magnificent. Mad. Surely, he must be out of his mind—but in a good way. (Think What the Bleep Do We Know!?)

In any given portrait, Hurt includes a myriad of relevant images in different sizes, shapes, and colors, overlapping and intertwining inside the drawing of a human face. But in “Greek,” one of his most powerful pieces (and a quantum leap from earlier works made up of simple, repetitive symbols that look like pixels on a computer screen) he relaxes the use of his trademark grid, and begins to leave behind the confines of the technology he so reveres. Hurt arranges the elements asymmetrically within the symmetrical outline of his subject’s face. The result? A more creative, chaotic effect that illustrates the nature of a mind in motion, and suggests that the greek scholar portrayed in “Greek” is on the verge of some brilliant discovery—as are we.In addition, Hurt’s work explores the question, “What would happen if the multitude of one’s thoughts were recorded on one’s face?” Sure, all that we think is etched within the hemispheres of our brain, but the inner workings of our mind are never fully seen, only alluded to in the works we conceive and birth. And oh what things Hurt’s mind has made! These kaleidoscopic portraits vibrate off the walls, and there’s no limit to what he, or the viewer, might do next (though a little meditation would be in good order).—Karrie Bos

NBA Ballers: Phenom

Xbox, PlayStation 2

Midway

Rated: Everyone

video game

Anyone who’s been following the NBA playoffs as they drag inexorably into midsummer can rattle them off like open 15-footers: Nash versus SamIam. Lebron James in round two. Plucky point guard Devin Harris, trying to will the Mavs past a hobbled Tim Duncan.

You know, the storylines.

Professional sports leagues—at least the ones like the NFL and NBA , who have honed the means of marketing themselves to fans—know that player-based storylines sell sizzle better than close matchups. Cavs versus Wizards looked like a small-market snoozer, but Bron-Bron versus Gilbert Arenas equaled six games of riveting rivalry.

Sports videogames have been slow—we’re talking Shawn Bradley slow—to pick up on this strategy. While developers have captured the feel of shooting a free throw or accurately approximating Jason Kidd’s assists-to-turnovers ratio, they’ve done comparatively little to give us a pixellated sense of what it’s like to actually be J-Kidd. Or a rookie trying to make it in—or, better yet, to—the NBA.

Electronic Arts gave us a hint of this sports-RPG experience in last fall’s Madden 06. In NBA Ballers: Phenom, the second installment in Midway’s streetball series, the concept is front-and-center—even if it’s not yet fully developed.

The game’s set in
Los Angeles during the NBA Finals. (Sorry, guys: Detroit would have been the safer pick.) You play the story mode as a streetballer who’s looking to make his name and pick up a sponsorship contract—just like the one your former partner sold you out to get last year. (Hello, instant rivalry subplot.)

While big chunks of the game are—what else?—one-on-one matchups in which you’re bouncing passes to yourself off your opponent’s grill or stair-stepping his shoulders to a monster dunk, there’s more here than just arcade-style hoops. You can also stroll around glitzy
Los Angeles buffing your stats, RPG style, in a host of non-basketball events and tasks (rap competitions, pasting up posters) that a hopeful trying to distinguish himself from the rabble might actually do. It’s not as deep as it could be, but it’s certainly a good baseline move. Now, if the developers can make the control scheme as intuitive as EA’s NBA Street series and fix the long PS2 load times, we’re talking some big-money ball.—Aaron Conklin

First Aid Kit Ruins (Sony) Stockholm’s Klara and Johanna Söderberg have lived a charmed life. In 2007, Swedish state radio turned one of their demos into a summer hit. In 2008, their video of Fleet Foxes’ “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” went viral, and their 2010 debut won rave reviews—all while

Chloe Edmonstone and Meredith Watson bring liveliness and experience to the mixture of bluegrass and traditional music that is Locust Honey. The American duo adds a vintage quality to its original songs, as well as on classic, prewar arrangements with a rotation of fiddles, open-back banjo,

Touted as one of the funniest plays ever written, Noises Off follows a troupe of actors that is performing a complete flop called Nothing’s On. Viewers get backstage passes to the ridiculous antics and offstage intrigue of the players, from rehearsal to the last performance, and the cast and

When writer and Charlottesville resident Patricia Asuncion took to the streets of Washington, D.C., during the 2017 Women’s March, her protest felt eerily familiar. “When I was first divorced in the 1970s, I had no credit. I had no bank accounts. I had nothing in my name. I didn’t even have the

A tale of science and psychology, A Wrinkle in Time imagines a scenario in which the universe wants those living within it to feel connected to themselves and everyone around them, and that the demons of depression and self-doubt are due to a great cosmic evil. Fifty years after it was first

On Charlie Shea’s first day of middle school two years ago, she received some words of wisdom from her father, Danny Shea. “My dad told me, ‘It’s going to suck. I’m just going to brief you,’” Shea remembers. In the past two years, she says she experienced “enough bad days to go around,” as well

A stage representative of a beautifully cared for home lights up, as does the face of the youngest version of Alison Bechdel, played by Violet Craighead-Way, as she begins to sing. I had only heard about Fun Home. I had never seen it (or listened to the music). I walked into Live Arts’

Dramatic mountainous backdrops compete with daring cinematography during the Banff Mountain Film Festival, where the audience has a bird’s-eye view of outdoor sports pros at their most extreme. The festival offers more than 30 short films that connect with personal stories like that of American

Being cautious has never been in Lucy Dacus’ playbook. Comfortable with big questions and lyrically confident, Dacus is still riding a wave of accolades from her debut, No Burden, an album that pegged her as someone to watch. Of her latest release, Historian, C-VILLE’s Nick Rubin says Dacus

Fun Home is a musical adapted from the autobiographical memoir of graphic artist Alison Bechdel, who chronicles her life from childhood to the present. When Bechdel’s father dies, she starts an introspective adventure, trying to make sense of their complicated and sometimes strained

It began at a Live Arts callback a few years ago. That’s where Lynn Thorne, a native Virginian who had just moved to Afton, met Jennifer. “We kind of became instant friends, and she shared with me pretty early on that her husband was transgender,” Thorne says. At the time, Thorne admits, she

Vocalist Veronica Swift has performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center several times. She’s got a regular gig at New York’s legendary Birdland, and she tours with trumpeter Chris Botti. She’s also shared the stage with Michael Feinstein, Esperanza Spalding and Paquito D’Rivera. But the 23-year-old

In Red Sparrow, a fallen Russian ballerina (Jennifer Lawrence) is given an impossible choice—to sacrifice her free will and dignity for her country by becoming a “sparrow” trained in the art of exploiting the sexual vulnerabilities of her targets, or lose the apartment and medical coverage

Jessica Lea Mayfield is done apologizing. The Nashville-based artist made her solo debut in 2008 with the album With Blasphemy So Heartfelt, produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. Known for towing the line between straight-ahead roots (she grew up playing in a bluegrass band with her family)

The Wind and The Wave has been quietly and unassumingly sweeping the alt-indie rock music scene since its debut album dropped in 2014. Made up of singer-songwriters Dwight Baker and Patty Lynn, who began making music just to see what would happen, The Wind and The Wave ended up with a serious

Canadian chamber-folk group Beyond the Pale formed in 2001, employing expert musicianship and dynamic song-crafting to create a sound that takes from jazz, reggae and classical music, while being heavily accented by Balkan and Romanian tradition. The group crosses musical borderlines on

In The Parking Lot Movie, the role of attendant goes beyond transactional and becomes a rite of passage. From their seat in the payment booth at The Corner Parking Lot on UVA Grounds, grads and undergrads spend their shifts intellectualizing and lamenting societal ills, from capitalism, anger

After years spent living abroad and around the U.S., Annie Temmink thought something was missing from her native Charlottesville. “I miss really great dancing and really wild visual clothing and adornment,” she says. “They’re rich opportunities for people to have moments of unbridled, creative

Game Night is a funny, exciting thriller-comedy with fun performances and a story that keeps you guessing. Who in the world saw this coming? Certainly not whoever edited the trailer, which sold it as another underwritten yarn with an on-the-nose title about insufferable schmucks who get in over